The present invention relates to an image joining apparatus, an image pickup apparatus, an image joining method, and an image joining program, and relates to, for example, an image joining apparatus, an image pickup apparatus, an image joining method, and an image joining program that join a plurality of still images or moving image sequences to create a still image.
In recent years, a technique for photographing a moving image while manually moving a camera so as to cover a large subject, joining a plurality of frames constituting the moving image, to thereby create a still image panorama has been put into practical use. Such a technique for creating a panoramic still image is generalized in the form of, for example, an additional function of a digital camera. Further, this technique is based on, as disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 3158735, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-284321 and Japanese Patent No. 3421859, a method in which a motion vector is derived during shooting with a panning technique and an area for a seam between frame images to be stitched together is controlled based on the motion vector.
There is also a conventional technique for forming a large image by connecting a plurality of still images or moving image sequences and this technique is generally and widely known as panorama, photomosaicing, and the like. Especially since the time that use of digital cameras became widespread, the use of software for automatically or semi-automatically performing such processing has become widespread. While the aforementioned Japanese Patent No. 3158735, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-284321 and Japanese Patent No. 3421859 are based on a linear camera trajectory, a technique for joining moving images captured along a free two-dimensional camera trajectory in principle is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2006-135386, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2013-30874, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2013-30875 and M. G. Gonzalez, P. Holifield and M. Varley, “Improved Video Mosaic Construction by Accumulated Alignment Error Distribution”, Proceedings of the British Machine Conference, pp. 38.1-38.11, BMVA Press, September 1998.